thought; a suffusion of glory, such as an editor in these days cannot
afford to reproach in himself, and would be mean if he disavowed
publicly. These pieces are sponsored from one little corner of the
American scene, yet they compose a body of work which seems ex-
cellent and trustworthy, possessing a kind of functional integrity,
perhaps bearing a national importance. What is indicated by such an
event, as it appears to me, is that one of the saving gifts of our age,
against the many ways it has devised for being wretched, is its turn
for literary criticism, and for a literary criticism evidently so enter-
prising and acute, and so grounded in good conscience, as can
scarcely be predicated of the other periods of literary history. Perhaps
it is compensatory, and makes some headway against the bad ten-
dencies of the time, including its foul humors and reckless human
strategies. The reader will judge that for himself.

It could be, if we might weigh all the intangible evidences, that
the literary critic is one of the most responsible agents of our very
best humanity. But of course I mean the good literary critic, the one
who by temperament and practice is healthy in his feelings and
habitually right in his judgments. The critic needs a great deal of
wisdom; sometimes he achieves it. But he is exposed to his own im-
patiences, and to blind alleys which he has supposed to be the short-
cuts of procedure. I think we do not trust the critic, at least the
young critic, whose tone is too righteous; on the assumption that
righteousness is defined for him by the doctrines of a "school" of
literary theory, or a "position." Often the literary object is going to
be too various for him, or too subtle. The doctrinal satisfactions
have spoiled many a critical apparatus in our time, disposing it to
shallow judgments; the harm is bad enough when the doctrine has
to do with honest-seeming ideologies, but it is especially brutal when
the critic is led to reject on the basis of supposed technical or formal
requirements. But there is one risk which I am prepared to run. I
am not constitutionally afraid of the critic who finds the human
significance that is hidden in the marginal behaviors of a piece of
literary plotting, or of a scene, or even a cluster of words, and devel-
ops it with a logical intelligence. Many of the critics here judge well
because they are professionally sensitive to what is latent in the work,
therefore likely to be difficult, and will not content themselves with
what is manifest and for everybody to see.

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